Curious to hear what you think about the Brilliant Smart Home System products? Seems like a decent place to integrate support to display live data from your Tempest station (instead of general weather from who knows where).
Thoughts?
is this relevant… perhaps more future proof and world -wide https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/8/21427139/amazon-apple-google-zigbee-alliance-open-source-smart-home-standard-2021-launch
(but not yet available)
It’s cloud based and has too many points of failure. So on that, I’ll pass.
4 Likes
I’m with Gary on this one. No way am I going to pay $299 for a screen that’s 8X smaller than my $99 Fire Tablet on the wall and has cloud dependencies. Plus, a lot of their integrations are dependent on Smart Things, which is in the process of becoming a flaming train wreck for developers and integrators…
2 Likes
All these late-comers to the game think they have all the answers. I’ve been doing this for 40 years. Designing and building crap that I hoped would not burn the house to the ground. While the Internet is nice there is no way I want some server in Bugtussle, Alabama controlling my house.
I have a security system, power management, cameras and home automation all wrapped into a nice neat package. All locally controlled, battery backed up and Internet independent. Now I just need a Generac and I’ll be happy for a few weeks.
4 Likes
I’m with Gary on this one, z-wave with a local Vera Edge controller and modules. Too many non-local dependencies gives me the willies and the last few months have proved just how fast things can go sideways.
2 Likes
I use Insteon for most lighting control because once programed it’s fully functional without a controller. Then I add in a bunch of Inovelli Z-Wave devices for fun.
1 Like
You mean like Will.i.am running out of money to pay Wink’s cloud bills yesterday?
From the DNS, it looks like Amazon AWS is hosting them today, and it was Unified Layer/Blue Host yesterday.
Did you know that I discovered the cause of Inovelli’s huge firmware issue when they launched their fan/light switch a few months ago? FWIW, every switch in our house except the coat closet, entry foyer, bathroom, and laundry room is now Inovelli Red Series Z-Wave, with multiple scene control and custom flashing notifications…
No interest.
Not a fan of ‘ever’ needing Internet for ‘any’ home automation, for security, reliability, and performance reasons. That includes weather data as well.
I use Home Assistant running in Docker on a small i3 NUC under Ubuntu.
(yes - it is very orange out today north of Tacoma- AQI was 300 briefly yesterday. Glad I’m not in the Portland/HoodRiver area which is about 500 currently.)
Integrated into HA is:
- Zwave door/window sensors via a dongle on the same i3 NUC
- Davis VP2 weather data from MQTT over the LAN, coming from weewx on a small Linux box
- air quality data from my PurpleAir by hitting the sensor’s REST api over the LAN
I don’t integrate anything talking Internet into my HA setup, meaning devices on my separate IoT VLAN and wifi network that ‘have’ to have Internet to function just use the blasted app we’re forced to install and use (grrrrrrr):
- Philips Hue bulbs I was gifted
- Blink cameras watching a couple doors
Note - the PurpleAir ‘does’ connect to the vendor for firmware updates and also to publish to their maps, and that vendor supplies your data to https://fire.airnow.gov (which is a fabulous use of my tax dollars in my opinion), but that is not required for it to function actually.
I found via experimentation that if you map the PA hostname to “purpleair-NNNN” where NNNN is your serial number, you can query the REST interface LAN-only even if your Internet is disconnected. Cool.
2 Likes
I did not know that was you. I have known Eric since his days at Kellogg. He has created a remarkable set of devices. Now if he can move forward and have the devices link to each other he can own the market.
1 Like
To know the number of things that can go sideways would require not “finite variable analysis”, but “infinite variable analysis”…now that’s a bit of software that would really sell well!
2 Likes
More than the Z-Wave Plus direct associations that are already supported???
1 Like
Yes. Much more. I should be able to send a single command that will set all devices to a state.
No more three-way switches. One switch (A) controls the light. Then several other switches can be linked to control (A) and they all act as responders. Once programmed they can work with out the Hub.
1 Like